The events of the Great Recession have been widely documented. However, much of crisis is clouded by subjectivity and self-interest. Among the hundreds of banks bailed out by the U.S. government were two quasi-financial institutions: General Motors and Chrysler. These automotive manufacturers struggled for years preceding the financial crisis, burdened by latent responses to shifting customer demands, competitive pressures from foreign OEMs, and an overarching complacency. Amid excessive lending and a buildup of unrealized losses, they trudged toward decline. 

The due collapse prompted the Bush administration to authorize the Troubled Asset Relief Program and extend $700 billion to stabilize banks. Meanwhile, frozen credit markets and contracting consumer spending rippled through the automotive sector, leaving the Big Three acutely exposed. Through repeated visits to Capitol Hill, executives convinced Bush that contagion risk from failed automakers would be crippling for the economy. $17.4 billion in emergency loans were consequently earmarked in late 2008. Obama continued diverting federal funds to buoy GM and Chrysler’s operations effectively postponing bankruptcy to June, which saw both undergo fast-tracked and controversial Section 363s.

The political salience of the 2008 bailout motivates an examination of corporate rhetoric in context. Using computational sentiment analysis, based on Loughran McDonald and FinBERT NLP, the study assesses for GM and Chrysler managements' qualitative misrepresentations of financial distress in MD&A and earnings call disclosures. Case analyses explore inter-stakeholder dynamics: competing OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, and dealer networks. 

Ultimately, the study contributes to a more complete understanding of how managements' portrayal of financial distress, and not merely the normative legal debates among decision-makers, shapes outcomes. Implications extend beyond 2008 as the automotive sector has faced continuous disruption. As the first such period able to be examined through scaled ML methodologies, the bailout lays groundwork for further research to inform more pragmatic assessments of OEMs navigating financial distress...

In accordance with their strategy set, and motivated by a combination of physical evidence documenting under-the-table agreements and Christie's 1998 take-private warranting governance consequences, Christie's took to federal prosecutors seeking amnesty. Sotheby's pled guilty shelling out fines of $45 million and an additional $20 million following a European Commission investigation, equivalent to around 6% of its global turnover. Civil litigation settlements involving both auction houses amounted to $512 million. The greatest loss, however, was implicit: a reputational stain from the enduring tension between art and profit.

A promising rebound in the market follows strong results in Paris this past week, where Yves Klein’s California (IKB 71) auctioned at a record hammer price for the year. It's a monochrome painting.

Klein dubbed the luminous ultramarine International Klein Blue, gaining traction first at Milan's Apollinaire Gallery in 1957. While French law forbids the ownership of colors, Klein was able to patent the formula—PB29 pigment, ethanol, and Rhodopas M, a synthetic resin.  I can appreciate the radical and sublime qualities of his work, the spiritual and sensory transcendence it seeks to evoke, but I’m not completely sold.

A fine artist by training, I’ve found contemporary art’s abstractions sometimes distasteful but over time come to view it as an exercise to appreciate things that don’t come in ways we please. The world doesn’t function on a singular aesthetic code. And really, IKB is pretty iconic: it's founded on a collaboration with chemists, it's a motif of Klein's oeuvre, its cultural buzz shows what comes out of sticking to your own formula... 

Like Klein, I love all things blue. Unlike Klein, I won't be getting an eponymous color anytime soon. If I could, it'd be like #02cce3.

Alfa Romeo's BAT series are concept cars designed by Florentine Franco Scaglione from 1953 to 1955. The futuristic, fluid design is just so pleasing to the eye. In a world of harsh edges, see Scaglione. 

His cars were built for aerodynamic design studies that were avant-garde even for the jet age styling of the 1950s. The first of the series, BAT 5, attains a drag coefficient of 0.23, lower than most production cars today. That’s incredible. The dual nose vents and protruding fins that first caught my attention remind me of a Batmobile from my brother's and my hot wheels collection. BAT 7 improved on these aerodynamic capabilities and ran in SCCA races in Southern California before entering private collections. The three cars were brought together for the first time in 1989 and have stuck together since. 

My favorite part of automotive design is when engineering becomes art.

Nothing made me question the Italian education system more than my Contemporary Art syllabus at Bocconi. The Mushroom at the End of the World was so mind-numbing a read that finally shelving it brought a relief I hope to never feel again. But maybe that’s to say Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing really challenged me.

The premise of Tsing’s mullings lies in matsutake, a species of mycorrhizal mushroom growing in the American Pacific Northwest and prized in Japanese cuisine. Tracing matsutake’s origin story through its movement in global supply chains, Tsing intends for readers to perceive mushroom not as an alienated capitalist asset but rather an active player in the complex entanglement—assemblage—of things. That referring to an open-ended gathering of species founded on "unintentional coordination and interplaying rhythms of life." You get the idea.

In the 1960s, timber companies' unchecked expansionism and logging practices wiped out Oregon's ponderosa and fir populations. The Forest Service’s wildfire prevention further starved the region of critical regenerative cycles. In the anthropocenic landscape, matsutake flourish. It began colonizing the disturbed forests with an emerging pine species and found way into human lives through the wild mushroom trade. 

Matsutake pickers hailed from Southeast Asia. US programs aimed to provide a safe haven for the Mien, Hmong, and Lao, survivors of wars. By their arrival in the late '80s, however, the conservative administration curtailed its social programs, leaving few resources for education, assimilation, and livelihood. The refugees retreated into the Cascade forests where culture and ways of life could be preserved. Tsing fixates on the informal conjoining of pickers and mushrooms as an exemplary post-capitalist assemblage.

Followed by a deep dive into supply chains and the role of matsutake—part gift, part commodity—en route to the Japanese dinner table, Tsing draws on for much more. But she constantly revisits the idea of life's precarity. Assemblages only arise from impromptu interspecies collaboration and contamination. 

I came to appreciate Tsing's inspiring of coexistence in an uncertain future during a long run on the Cerchia dei Navigli. My next thought was why that required becoming a top-decile expert on the economics of rare fungi.

At least it all came into use as I prepped for Prof. Giusti's oral final, drilling every last of Tsing’s philosophical tangents into my head. I've never felt such simultaneous apathy and perturbed fascination... This wasn't even art anymore. Mind you, this wasn't the only text either. Haraway’s conceptions of the Chthulucene or the Fowkes’ miscellany on human exceptionalism were also arduous reads. Let's save it for another day.

Gallerie d’Italia - A stunning collection of 19th-century Lombard paintings with contemporary works tossed in the mix. Galleries of cathedral scenes indulged me in chiaroscuro study. Good pieces on the Risorgimento, including Albertis’ ll Richiamo dei Cavalli Sbandati.

Fondazione Prada - As a French New Wave enthusiast, stumbling upon Cinema Godard was a quaint surprise. The kitsch duck installation and Höller’s mushrooms are must-sees. Founded by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli in 1993. 

Il Cenacolo - Da Vinci's storied mural is any dilettante's (literal) mecca. Coveted tickets release in three-month batches—I'd advise against dusk bookings because the tempera has kind of faded. Standing on the opposite side of the refectory rather than crowding up close also allows one to better take in the brilliance of Da Vinci's composition.

Museo del Novecento - Three floors of Postwar Italian art, a wrestle between abstraction and classical revival. Italian futurism showcases art's capacity to drive political fervor. Several pieces by Melotti and Marini, too. A well-worth side quest to the usual Duomo visit. 

Fondazione Luigi Rovati - I was impressed by the Hypogeum's extensive collection of Etruscan pottery and metalwork. The space? Very Zaha Hadid-coded. Cool palace restoration with floor-to-ceiling tapestries and curio cabinets of oriental ceramics.

Pinacoteca di Brera - Showing up at 8:30am and saying “Sono uno studente di storia dell'arte di Bocconi”? Doesn't hurt. The collection, originating with the Habsburgs, features work as old as tempera triptychs and illuminated manuscripts. Highlights also include Raphael, Caravaggio, and of course, Hayez. Had I brought sketch materials I'd beeline for an art horse and get some studies in.

Museo delle Culture - Ex-factory housing permanent collection Global Milan, spanning the city's history under shifting rule, trade with Asia, and Italy's colonial empires abroad. Its wide selection of anthropological artifacts reminded me of the Penn Museum. This was perfect for a late night study break.

Triennale - 1930s palazzo located in Parco Sempione. It's Milanese design in all forms: industrial, fashion, furniture, graphic—you name it. Gae Aulenti displays Fiats suspended in time and space. After All strews apocalyptic plastic sculptures with zero explanation. My favorite part was flipping through blueprints and urban development plans in Cuore.

Museo del Risorgimento - Milan, having been the cultural and intellectual center in the reunification movement, tells its history through enfilades of artifacts and artwork. The palazzo belonged to the Morigi family from Maggiore. I have a bone to pick with the fact that all the labels are placed at like hip-level. Steps away from Giorgio Armani’s home.

Pirelli HangarBicocca - Contemporary art housed in an old tire factory 25-minutes out of the city by M5. The hangar was operated by the Ansaldo Group which built much of Lombardy’s railway networks. One word to describe it all: sublime. See: Anselm Kiefer’s Seven Heavenly Palaces featuring 65-ft high towers, Saodat Ismailova’s A Seed Under Out Tongue film about extinction (which was part of Prof. G's syllabus!).

Galleria d'Arte Moderna - Spanning three floors, the Villa Reale was a sight I regularly jogged past on my runs (plus this was chef's kiss). It was also a residence of Napoleon's for a time. Lombard Romanticist works, lots of portraits and genre paintings, and some international modernist features. Finally paid a visit this month but was borderline delirious from a night out and only made it through the permanent exhibition. 

Palazzo Morando - Tucked away on a side street in Quad d’Oro, the fashion district of Milan. The paintings of Duomo and city gates really transport you back to their renaissance. An exhibition for Galtrucco, founded in Turin, displayed a variety of haute couture design, heritage collaborations, and textile craftsmanship.

Taking the PCH to work has given me lots of seascape inspiration...Malibu’s marine-layered mornings have so etched in my head that painting my latest one was satisfyingly easy. 

My coastal oeuvre and real-world experiences are inseparable. Beyond observations from daily life in California and beach-hopping the Mediterranean, I find a decent amount of scientific inquiry weaves its way in. This summer I was extra motivated by a desire to improve my wave count; studying up on oceanography seemed a logical way to better scope out and time surfable swells. It was fascinating to learn that below an approaching wave are columns of orbitals churning water. The deepest orbitals' contact with nearshore seabeds generates friction slowing the wave down. Instability compounds when a wave's height further exceeds 1/7 of its wavelength. Upon breaking, bubbly foam captures and circulates atmospheric gases, facilitating photosynthetic processes below the surface.

In between painting sessions, I read up on more topics: submarine canyons, coastal engineering structures, basic (heavy emphasis on basic) tidal physics. Science is highly informative to art, and vice versa, an idea I feel has eluded the modern education system. It came about over a decade of training in fine arts academies. Light, middle tones, shadows, and reflections were introduced to me from a highly technical perspective. And so rigorously that sketches would be critiqued to the singular stroke that fell out of line. That routine of molding my Prismacolor eraser into a pin-sharp point, dabbing the rubber onto glossy graphite-saturated paper, and blending meticulously until the over-erased streak seamlessly disappeared. All too familiar. I really appreciated the stubs that became of my 2H and 4Bs by the time I graduated from reps of elementary solids. 

Later, portrait classes involved mastering drawings of the skull with muscular system overlay before one could even think of sketching a face of flesh. Demo sessions covered masseter striations and nasolacrimal ducts. Like hello, we were a bunch of high schoolers, not MS2s. Afternoons of live figure drawing trained my hand in translating a nude body into a mélange of S- and C-curves, tenets of the gesture drawing technique underlying Hollywood animation.

Though I no longer partake in formal art training, I revel in the process of applying technical study and exploration to my creative side. As with my seascapes, they in my mind are not so much swaths of blue as renderings of augmented cylinders scattering light across countless planes. With an embellishing spray of pearl-white paint.

Ambling through travertine-clad museum grounds on a Monday afternoon was the last thing I expected during my stint at The Getty’s investment office (among studying the Yale Model, perusing appraisal and provenance records, and speaking to M. Burry are you kidding). But that was my summer!

The Getty's West Pavilion galleries are a bear hug from yours truly. My camera roll overflows with close-ups of old masters which I turn to for instruction and inspiration. The Gentileschi portraits are arresting even in my memory: I recall on a tour with the CIO a stirring fascination with Lucretia's commentary on pre-republic Roman politics. W204 etches transient impressionist scenes into minds. Monet and Cézanne challenge me to improve my plein-air hand. The way gestural brushstrokes paradoxically create a complete work show me there’s so much more to achieve than photorealism. 

Art serves an important role in culture as a catalyst for meaningful reflection and social change, capable of reaching audiences across time and place. Its scope for activism is particularly relevant amid environmental degradation in the modern day. Global warming has precipitated surges in air pollution, extreme weather patterns, and rising sea levels. In response, scientists have come to propose the “Anthropocene" as a new geologic age defined by human impact. While acceptance of the terminology has been protracted, artists have throughout history questioned human interaction with the environment, entertaining the Anthropocene long before its conception. One such activist is Alexis Rockman.

Rockman’s American Icons series (2004-09) blends natural history and the oil medium across sixteen large-scale paintings. The opening piece, 8- by 24-feet Manifest Destiny, is a futuristic panorama of his New York City hometown juxtaposing recognizable environmental catastrophes with an eerie human absence. Rockman invites viewers to speculate on the consequences of the Anthropocene.

Interestingly, the dystopian landscape commands strong visual ethos, marked by authentic chiaroscuro techniques and sublime allusions. A comprehensive analysis compares elements of Manifest Destiny to select works of Romanticists Thomas Moran and Thomas Cole, Surrealists Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, and Color Field artists Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Understanding the impact of these influences permits an informed understanding of Rockman’s nuanced artistic license...